Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Then Hōïchi raised his voice and chanted the story of the battle on the bitter sea. He skillfully made his biwa a traditional Japanese short-necked lute sound like the straining of oars, the rushing of ships, the whir and hiss of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets, and the plunging of the slain into the water. To his left and right, in the pauses of his playing, he could hear voices murmuring praise: “What a marvelous artist!”—“Never in our own province has such playing been heard!”—“In the entire empire, there is no other singer like Hōïchi!”

Then fresh courage came to him, and he played and sang even better than before, as a hush of wonder deepened around him. But when at last he came to tell the fate of the beautiful and the helpless—the pitiful death of the women and children, and the death-leap of Nii-no-Ama The widow of the clan leader, who jumped into the sea with her grandson, the seven-year-old Emperor Antoku, to avoid capture with the imperial infant in her arms—then all the listeners uttered together one long, shuddering cry of anguish. Afterward, they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the intensity of the grief he had stirred. For a long time, the sobbing and the wailing continued. But gradually the sounds of lamentation died away; and again, in the great stillness that...

...part is the deepest.” The Japanese word for pity in the original text is aware A central concept in Japanese aesthetics signifying a bittersweet pathy or the "pathos of things".